I have a new book forthcoming from Blue Light Press called Bend Of Quiet. I teach creative writing and English at Widener University in Pennsylvania. One of the ways we endured this winter was watching the birds at our feeders. And, of course, listening to music.

Walk in an Autumn Cemetery

The dead are so alive,while we, the living,stroke TV and computers.Not that I’d change places—

I’ll have to soon enough.Coffins cramp and cremation sounds odd to a guy like me who hates hot weather. But

a cemetery, calm and quiet,why feel uneasy there? Epitaphsreveal the dead morethan decades of words when

they lived—a smoker’s epitaph: I made an ash of myself.Many dead have that insouciance. The living have

runs up like a message boywith a telegram: You’re next!it reads. I bolt— grass arms hold me in place.

-first appeared in The Battered Suitcase.

Hortense

You don’t look like a bird who wants to make friends. Your eyes,swamp water at night. I could drown in them whether I’m careful or not. You gnaw

mouse guts. The Wildlife Center tends to your wishes, lets you walk around before they open. You run the place, not them.

I’m told you’re around forty. With a broken wing, you hardly made it to the sky, didn’t have the pleasure of fixing your stare and leaping down, claws out. Maybe a turkey vulture

shouldn’t have everything done for her. If one has to be pampered, I’m glad it’s you. And sad too.

8:45 P.M.

When Jeff and Jerry sit on the couch after a long day, they often say little. Peggy Lee rides a sleigh out of the propane fireplace. Sometimes they don’t even wave, even when she sings “Is That All There Is?”

Silence, an unplugged engine, beautiful, in its way, like a glass filled with artificial snow, shaken, set on the mantle.

Silence is a horse that lies down in the field.

Some days it’s best to send words out to play. Sit like two Buddhas, stone, the world slipping into pajamas and going to sleep.